The English PEN recently launched ‘Poems for Pussy Riot‘ in support of three members of the Russian punk band — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich — who are currently serving a two year prison sentence, appeal hearing of which comes up on October 1, 2012.

The following contribution comes from Jack Underwood, poet, lecturer at Goldsmiths College and co-editor of the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives:

Look! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN has just shot
a rare Siberian Tiger with a dart gun! Surely he is at one
with/connected to/ master of nature at its most fierce.
And look look! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN has
just spoken fluent goose to some rare migrating geese as
he flies adjacently to them in a light aircraft, wearing a
beak, leading them to safety, just as he metaphorically
leads our nation with a cool, authoritive dignity.
Look now! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN has just
woken up and thumped out two hundred loaves of dough
in a masculine and serious way, to be baked for the
starving old people.
And look look! A crowd of beautiful women sing how
they wish their boyfriends were as conscientious and as
traditionally masculine as OUR GLORIOUS LEADER
PUTIN as they shake their feminine behinds respectfully
at his motorcade silly girls.
Ah wow look! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN has
been diving in the sea with his shirt off showcasing his
masculine figure to his country and the World as he finds
some ancient artefacts on the seabed again.
And bravo! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN throws
a lesser man in Judo!
Whoof! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN rides a
horse masterfully with his shirt off!
Listen! OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN is laughing
at a joke, displaying to our country and the World that
despite possessing an overall masculinity of impregnable
steel, he is able to laugh at an authorised joke somebody
has made in line with the concerns and beliefs of OUR
GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN.
And see OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN has just
masturbated in the shower, in line with the
recommendations of the Ministry of Healthcare of the
Russian Federation. After all, he is nearly only a man, for
which this is ordinary behaviour.
Observe now how OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN
cleans his penis after with a q-tip, so tidily and neatly, as
if he were erasing a small secret from his past as a KGB
hero/agent.
And now OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN is
drinking a glass of his own delicious and superior vodka
brand PUTINKA. Surely there is no other vodka brand
currently available on the market that typifies the
drinking requirements of an actual Russian man.
And imagine that as OUR GLORIOUS LEADER PUTIN
swallows the cold-hot transparency of it, he opens his
ears to himself and hears not one dissenting voice from
within; thusly closing the wound of each of his thoughts
with the same brute salve of his sure and right reflection.